Texas education official on school finance suit: “I hope we lose”

AUSTIN — If you’re a defendant in a lawsuit — especially one where the constitutionality of the state’s school finance system hangs in the balance — you might want to win.

Not Thomas Ratliff, a Republican on the State Board of Education, which is a defendant in the recently reopened Texas school finance trial.

“I hope we lose,” Ratliff said in a phone interview Friday.

The board was sued — along with the Texas Education Agency and its commissioner, Michael Williams — by hundreds of school districts in 2012 after the Texas Legislature cut $5.4 billion out of the state’s public education budget during the 2011 legislative session.

State District Judge John Dietz, who ruled the state’s school finance system unconstitutional in February, reopened the trial Tuesday to examine the effects of two bills passed by the Legislature in 2013 would have on hundreds of school districts: House Bill 5, which revamped graduation and testing standards, and the state’s budget bill, which restored roughly two-thirds of funds cut during in 2011.

Ratliff — a Microsoft lobbyist vilified in some conservative circles for being too moderate on hot-button social issues like teaching creationism in biology classrooms — said that’s not enough, adding that state officials “are not doing the best we can do for those kids in the finance arena.”

“I’d like to see the budget match the rhetoric” of officials who claim to put public education funding high on their list of policy priorities, Ratliff said.

The board is expected to finalize additional graduation requirements under House Bill 5 at their meeting next week.